I am kinda hoping that the Republicans do obstruct whoever Obama nominates, and Sanders wins in a landslide. So instead of confirming some moderate-to-conservative consensus pick, they end up having a far-left fuck-you pick shoved down their throats.

And they can’t even complain, because it’s exactly the kind of electoral mandate they said they wanted for Scalia’s replacement.

This week’s quote is from Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives, about an IT guy at a secret paranormal government agency:

In the case of the great circuit of Al-Hazred, the terminator was originally a black goat, sacrificed at midnight with a silver knife touched only by virgins, but these days we just use a fifty microfarad capacitor.

And, of course, there’ll be other people’s cats watching other other people’s cats…

Today’s weird realization: I have a very good sense of timing, but almost no sense of time.

That is to say, I’m pretty good as estimating how long things will take, like whether I have to run to make the light or if I shouldn’t even bother, or whether I can pass someone ahead of me before the sidewalk narrows, or whether I have enough time to accomplish a given activity. I’d like to think I have pretty good comedic timing too, but so much of my interactions are textual now that I don’t even know anymore.

And yet, on the other hand, I have almost no idea how long something took, or how long ago something happened if it was more than a day or two. The only explanation I can think of is that it’s a difference between calculation and some kind of data retrieval that I’m lousy at (i.e., indexed by time rather than association).

This week’s quote is from Disco Godfather, starring the incomparable Rudy Ray Moore:

Now, you take a guy who’s played ball most of his life – he’s gonna be hungry. If he can’t make the NBA, he’s gonna be mad and hungry. With my new team, the objective is to pick up those guys. I can’t lose.

The Atlantic has an interesting article on the “post-work” future, when automation (and probably outsourcing) has eliminated so many jobs that massive unemployment is structurally unavoidable, at least as far as traditional corporate employment goes. It covers far too much territory for me to attempt to summarize, but I wanted to jot down a few thoughts of my own.

In the section on government “makework,” why no mention of infrastructure renewal except in the past tense? The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated the total cost of fixing our infrastructure at $3.6 TRILLION– I find it very hard to believe that that would not translate into an enormous amount of construction and engineering jobs, but perhaps the assumption is that most of the construction and engineering tasks would be performed by robots.

The most direct approach would be for the government to raise taxes on corporations and the rich in order to give everyone a “universal basic income,” which both Nixon and Milton Friedman supported back in the 60s. If there isn’t enough work to go around, this will be absolutely imperative, not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from an economic perspective as well: Corporations still need consumers to be able to afford their products.

There were also sections on the possibility of people becoming independent artisans, or the government helping them start small businesses, which is all well and good, but it will be a lot easier for people to make that leap if they’re not desperately clinging to or searching for a job (or two), or wondering where their next meal – or roof – is coming from.

The bottom line is that until we finally repudiate the conservative Randian belief that the unemployed are worthless, lazy parasites who must be punished economically (in the guise of “tough love,” of course) rather than reduce the winnings of the “job creators,” the post-work future will be about desperation and misery instead of creativity and opportunity.